Meet the 22-year-old college dropout who wants to power every future self-driving car

There's a race to the bottom in making self-driving cars more
affordable than ever, but Austin Russell has been running an
entirely different race.

The 22-year-old college dropout has been sitting
quietly for the last five years and watching as manufacturers
rush to create cheaper versions of Lidar, a laser-based
radar system that's a key component in self-driving cars since it
allows cars t0 "see" the road.

Russell, now the CEO of self-driving car technology startup
Luminar, decided to skip working on
a cheap system, instead spending the last five
years with cofounder Jason Eichenholz putting together a
Lidar system they hope is better than the rest.

“There’s a reason we’ve been in stealth so long," Russell said.
"If we announced our plans five years ago, everybody would be
doing this.”

Comes down to seconds

Just four piers down from San Francisco's famous seals at
Fisherman's Wharf is an empty cruise terminal filled with a
smattering of fake deer, mannequins, and tires strategically
stationed at points on the floor.

Fake
deer and abandoned tires litter the floors of an empty cruise
terminal where Luminar does its range testing.Biz Carson/Business Insider

At one end of the warehouse, Luminar has installed its
Lidar device into a car, pointed at its target: A blackboard as
tall as an SUV, sitting next to a "200 meter" sign.

This had been Russell's target to hit before publicly debuting
his five-year-old startup, Luminar. 200 meters is longer than
most Lidar systems for self-driving cars can see, and seeing dark
black objects reliably at that distance is even harder.

During a press demonstration at the pier, Russell and
Eichenholz's system zoomed in on the black billboard in the
distance. The Lidar was even able to pick up the pigeon
walking in the middle of the fake deer on the floor, nearly
100 meters away from the car.

Russell was a kid of barely legal driving age when he decided to
conquer self-driving cars. He'd been a tinkerer most of his life.

He memorized the periodic table by two, transformed a
Nintendo game handset by the sixth grade, and made a holographic
keyboard in high school. In 2012, Russell founded Luminar
and soon after started doing independent research at the Beckman
Laser Institute.

When he got to Stanford University in 2013, venture capitalist
Peter Thiel paid the then-18-year-old Russell $100,000 to drop
out of school. His Thiel fellowship bio said he had a "passion
for developing innovative optoelectronic technologies". For
Russell, being innovative meant having the patience to build
a better Lidar that would not only advance an industry, but do it
in a field that could save people's lives.

"We’re able to see seven seconds out instead of one second,"
Russell said. "That’s a really big breakthrough."

While some manufacturers say they can produce a Lidar that sees
out to 200 meters, most advertised models can't scan that far
ahead. Going highway speeds, that means a car equipped with
Luminar's Lidar would have seven seconds of reaction time when it
identifies an object at 200 meters compared to the typical few
seconds most Lidar systems provide, Russell claims.

What Luminar's lidar sees
from the road.Luminar

Of those that can hit the 200 meter mark, Eichenholz says Luminar
is in a class of its own because it can see objects
with 10% reflectivity at that distance. That
low-reflectivity number is key because objects like black cars
and even people wearing black t-shirts can be harder to spot
since the color is less reflective.

"You don't have to say everyone has to wear a white t-shirt,"
Eichenholz joked.

An entirely different system

Russell and Eichenholz claim Luminar can do all this because
they're not using the same off-the-shelf parts as other
Lidar companies. Instead, they spent the last five years
designing a system from scratch.

For starters, the company eschewed traditional Lidar designs and
build a new one on a different wavelength than traditional
systems. While many Lidars systems operate at a 905 nano-meter
wavelength, Luminar is at a 1550 nano-meter wavelength,
which means it can emit 68 photons for every single one put out
on the traditional wavelength, making it more powerful but still
safe for eyes.

“Eye safety is a really big deal in this industry, It’s actually
is a limiting factor of a lot of Lidar sensors today,"
Russell said. "You can’t fry people’s eyes with sensors."

Austin
Russell installing Luminar LiDAR onto vehicleLuminar

The decision to switch wavelengths set off a cascade of events
for the startup. Namely, there were no off-the-shelf products it
could use. It's had to do everything from creating its own chips
and circuit design to manufacturing its own indium gallium
arsenide, a chemical compound that it's using as a receiver in
its Lidar unit instead of silicon.

The company tried 2,000 different ways to construct a Lidar
system before deciding on one that was both functional and
manufacturable, Russell said.

The company raised $36 million from venture capitalists including
GVA Capital, Canvas Ventures, and the 1517 Fund, a venture firm
backed by Thiel. With the money, Russell acquired one of
Luminar's suppliers to lock up its supply chain from competitors,
He also brought on Eichenholz's previous company, Open
Photonics, and named him cofounder and CTO.

Luminar cofounder and CTO Jason Eichenholz
(right)Luminar

While Russell oversees the company's Silicon Valley office,
a converted tank repair facility in Portola Valley, the majority
of the company's 150 employees are based in its Orlando, Florida
office, which contains both R&D headquarters and 50,000
square foot manufacturing facility.

Even though Luminar has stayed quiet for the last five
years, it's already produced 100 units for its strategic
partners, which include both unidentified automakers and software
companies. Now, Luminar is ready to begin its first major
commercial run of 10,000 units, set to be distributed among
many customers instead of just putting it in the hands of a
few.

"Our plan is to power every autonomous vehicle that’s produced
and make them so they can truly be safe and autonomous," Russell
said of his long-term vision.

Our plan is to power every autonomous vehicle that’s produced and
make them so they can truly be safe and autonomous

To do that, the college dropout's startup will have to overcome
major incumbents like Velodne as well as another onslaught
of software companies — like Google and
Waymo — that have developed their own
in-house Lidar systems. But Russell is confident that
Luminar's system will become the new standard, and
he's not worried that everyone will soon be joining his race
lane now that his company's plans are public.

"The key thing here is that starting this five years ago we have
a huge head start and advantage," he said. "No matter how
much money you throw at this problem, you don’t need hundreds of
millions or billions to develop this. It’s about the time it
takes."